NYT's Issa story under scrutiny

New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau opened his Monday front page story on the overlap between Rep. Darrell Issa’s business and governmental work with a compelling scene:

“Here on the third floor of a gleaming office building overlooking a golf course in the rugged foothills north of San Diego, Darrell Issa, the entrepreneur, oversees the hub of a growing financial empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Story Continued Below

But here’s the problem: Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize winner, says he never saw that exact view of Shadowridge Country Club — though he did visit the third floor of the building. And Issa’s office says the course cannot be seen from anywhere in the building.

That’s only a minor point in a story that Issa, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, is saying is riddled with inaccuracies. In the days since the story ran, Issa has been on a crusade against the story, which put Issa’s business and political life under a tough spotlight.

Issa claims that The Times asserted a building he bought went up in value, when it did not and the story said Issa went easy on Toyota during congressional inquiries because a company he founded was a supplier to them, when in fact Issa says his Directed Electronics corporation does not have a relationship with Toyota. Issa’s camp also says the Times’ assertion that his charitable foundation reaped a windfall from a financial holding is false, as he actually lost money on the investment.

The Times is standing by Lichtblau and the story. The paper is not going to issue the front-page retraction that Issa’s camp demanded Friday morning, though the paper did issue a correction on the story on Tuesday on a separate matter.

Dean Baquet, the Times’ D.C. bureau chief who is becoming a top editor in New York this fall, said he is looking at Issa’s office’s complaints.

“I think if you look carefully at Mr. Issa’s complaints, and the story, you will see that there is nothing that gets to the heart of it,” Baquet said. “Happy to consider any mistakes they point out, and we are looking at those. But I’m not seeing a need for any sort of retraction.”

He also argued that Lichtblau’s lede was not misleading.

“I don’t think it implied — at least to my mind — that Issa’s office overlooked the golf course,” he said. “I think it is trying to give a sense that this is a building in a cool area. That’s the way I always read it. Otherwise it really would have said his office overlooked the golf course. That would have been even cooler to say.”

He believes the pushback over the golf course view is a distraction from the story’s main point.

“It feels to me, to be frank, that the discussion of a very sophisticated and nuanced story has been shifted to what the story did not say, rather than what it did say,” he said. “What it did say is that Mr. Issa is doing something rare among members of Congress by actively leading a business empire and that this raises questions that are rarely confronted. I think that is a very, very legitimate issue to explore in the pages of the paper.”

Lichtblau, who did visit the hall of the third floor, told POLITICO he didn’t see the golf course from any of the windows of that floor. He said he stood at Shadowridge Country Club, about a quarter mile to the southwest of the building, and could see the building from there.